Biden should be on the phone with Putin. JFK met with Khrushchev, Nixon met with Brezhnev, Reagan met with Gorbachev. Can’t Biden meet with Putin?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Bobby Kennedy – the father and the son – should be on Democrat minds today. The former, because he saw impoverished rural whites and told his party to not judge infirmity and poverty by the color of its skin. The latter, because he saw the “corrupt merger of state and corporate power” and told his party it would keep losing working-class and middling Americans to Trump’s populist movement.
And how have Democrats and their media allies responded? By calling Kennedy “bizarre” and charging Trump with 91 felony counts, when the rise of “Rich Men North of Richmond” should give them pause (20,000,000 YouTube views in a week): Been selling my soul, working all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay. Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end, cause of rich men north of Richmond (its social-media popularity is multiracial, by the way).
By conflating America First populism and Donald Trump, Democrats don’t see an angry movement begat by an angry populace (AP/NORC reports 92% of Republicans and 78% of Democrats are dissatisfied with the state of the union). It’s sheer arrogance to dismiss Vivek Ramaswamy and Bobby Kennedy, who attract young voters longing for American revival.
Kennedy has a great metamessage – my father and uncles left us a perfectly fine nation, and you guys are screwing it up – that fits the times: The Hill reports a “historic number of Americans” prefer neither Biden nor Trump. Don’t bet on Kennedy to become president, but don’t ignore a message that drove “little guys” to Bernie Sanders and “forgotten Americans” to Trump. These record levels of anger – invited by Democrats – were first noted by Gallup in 2015.
Bill Clinton did usher China into the WTO. Obama did demonize police departments. Biden did order COVID tyranny. And everyday Americans know whom to blame for wage stagnation, increased lawlessness, product scarcities, dumbed-down students, and blue cities in post-apocalyptic ruin. Crowds cheer as Kennedy rails against censorship, forced vaccines, and forever wars. His bifurcated climate message is better than most.
Liberals hear this climate message: “What polluters do is make themselves rich by making everybody else poor, raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by cheating.” But, conservatives hear this: “Free market capitalism is the core solution for every environmental problem, because a true free market promotes efficiency. Efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution is waste.”
When he bashes Biden’s handling of the Ukraine war, he’s the Ghost of Kennedys Past, constantly recalling what he learned “as a boy” from his uncle. He is informed by a speech (“A Strategy for Peace”) JFK made in 1963, after the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis forced him to walk in his Russian rival’s shoes. As Kennedy tells it, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden ignored the lessons JFK learned the hard way.
When JFK put missiles in Italy and Turkey, Khrushchev had to put missiles in Cuba. Rather than war, JFK horse-traded; removing US missiles from Turkey after Russia removed its missiles from Cuba. Fast-forward to 1990. James Baker told Gorbachev NATO would move “not one inch eastward” if Russia let Germany re-unify and join NATO. As soon as the Warsaw Pact collapsed, NATO moved eastward. Kennedy sees Russia’s fear.
He wants a peace plan that removes the threat of NATO forces in Ukraine: “The Russians had already agreed to two eminently reasonable treaties, the Minsk accords in 2015 and the second peace agreement in 2022 that everybody signed. And the Russians were acting in good faith, removing troops from Ukraine.” Anti-war Democrats with peace plans were once beloved, but the DNC won’t let Biden debate Kennedy, and TV networks won’t host a Kennedy Town Hall.
Why? Because RFK sounds too much like Trump, like saying “we ought to have 100 percent confidence in our voting system” and being for “protecting the American worker.” Or, it could be that Harvard-Harris’s July poll found RFK with the highest favorability rating (47%) among presidential candidates. It could also be they see the pincer effect of both Kennedy and Trump proving the horrors of the “corrupt merger of state and corporate power.”
Conservatives need RFK telling voters the “deep state” does exist, Fauci aided and abetted China’s COVID lab, and that Biden denied a “Kennedy” Secret Service protection. Because the last three years prove Anybody But Biden cannot be achieved by Republicans alone. If you can’t see the anger transcends race, watch America react to Rich Men North of Richmond on YouTube (click the tinted words and get out the Kleenex).
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